Authors: Anne C. Petty
They’d walked a block down to the Miami River seawall and sat on a park bench, watching joggers and skaters pursuing their quest for physical perfection. Alice had cried until she had no tears left, and Hal had waited patiently until she’d finally asked, “Is it true?”
“Only half. Yes, Suzanne is my sister, but I am not your father.”
Alice sat stunned. “Then who is?”
“A man you’ve never met, nor ever will.” He’d then told her of the death of Ned Waterston during his honeymoon expedition to Australia with his bride, twenty-four-year-old Suzie Blacksburg. Hal explained how, a few months after their departure, Suzanne had called home, barely in control of herself, with the news that she was stranded, alone and terrified, somewhere in Queensland and that something unspeakable had happened to her new husband. Beyond that, she was not very coherent.
Hal had gotten on a plane and gone to fetch her. He explained how Suzanne, just visibly pregnant, had suffered a mental breakdown upon arriving home and how, when her baby was born, she seemed afraid to hold it or look at it, as if it might have some deformity. She was diagnosed as clinically depressed and spent time in and out of various private hospitals.
Hal confessed with a catch in his throat that when Suzanne’s mental state did not improve as Alice entered childhood, he took it upon himself to become father as well as uncle, ignoring the fact that some day he would have to come clean. He’d apologized repeatedly that she’d had to learn about it from someone who didn’t understand the facts. Poor Hal, he’d been so truly miserable, she’d been afraid he would cry, too. As it was, the incident brought them closer, and she could not have loved him more if he’d been her real father, whose face Suzanne apparently saw whenever she looked at Alice. Why that was so horrible, her mother would never explain. Not even on her damned deathbed.
Over the years, and once Alice had made her own life with a suitable husband and child, Suzanne had managed to reinvent herself. Still living with her brother, she'd become a fairly competent business woman. Something in real estate, Alice remembered. When Hal reached retirement age, they’d bought an upscale beach house on the Florida Gulf coast to be closer to Suzanne’s granddaughter. Alice frowned, remembering. After her divorce, Suzanne and Hal had tried to convince her that moving in with them would be safer, but she’d told them nothing doing. She loved her house in the woods with its second floor deck that faced into a sea beech, pine, and oak. Margaret had agreed with her—they weren’t leaving. Adjusting to life as a twosome had its rough patches, but they were making it work. And then, unexpectedly, there was Nik.
Alice sighed and pressed herself against him. He’d been in the States a number of years, pursing a degree in Mycology, paying his way as a part-time illustrator at the museum, where she’d met him. They began seeing each other not long after her divorce. The fit was good, intellectually and other ways, and most importantly, Margaret liked him. He was her anchor now, with his wholesome Swedish family of parents and siblings overseas who cared for each other no matter what else was going on in their lives. She wondered what it would be like to live in a family like that.
Suzanne had wanted to know all about Nik when Alice finally confessed, a few years ago, they were an item. It was ironic, thinking about it now, how Suzanne had kept Alice at arm’s length for so long and then performed a one-eighty once she became a grandmother—wanting to know every little thing that might have the slightest impact on Margaret’s welfare. Alice smiled against the pillow. Over the past week Suzanne had gotten an earful as she lay trapped on her deathbed, listening without reprieve to Alice’s memoir of love and pain and loss.
“Did you care the least little bit about me? What did you hate seeing when you looked at me?” Alice had demanded of the comatose figure. “Hey, are you listening?”
As usual, Suzanne refused to be interrogated, and Alice was left to fill in the gaps with her own imagination. In life, and now in death, it was the only relationship mother and daughter had ever known.
Chapter 2
July 1953
“Hey boy, you alive?”
Ned cracked an eyelid. Daylight lanced his skull, and he clamped the lid shut. He tried to speak, but there was no feeling in his tongue. He willed it to form words.
“Unnggh.”
“Shit, he is alive! Gimmie a hand here. We’ll lay him in the truck.”
“Dead weight,” another voice grunted.
“Just a skinny kid. Here, hoist up his legs ... holy fuck, lookit that.”
“Snakebite. See them double fang marks?”
“Cottonmouth?”
“Nawsuh, rattlesnake. This fella’s lucky to be alive.”
“Wouldn’t wanna be alive in that shape.”
Ned felt his body lift off the ground. The motion was nauseating, but then he felt a sublime sensation of floating. He sprouted wings and soared high above the pine scrub and palmettos. Far below, he saw a battered gray pickup truck with two dark-skinned men wrestling something into the truck bed. Then his wings evaporated, and he was plummeting toward the tiny figures, landing hard with a loud metallic clunk.
“Hey, watch his head there.”
Merciful darkness descended.
* * *
When the light returned, it was muted. Ned opened his eyes and blinked a few times. He was in somebody’s bedroom. Sun-faded lace curtains shielded the single window, and late afternoon light heated a patch on the bare plank floor beside the bed. Against the wall directly opposite the bed, a chest of drawers in dark wood dominated the room, its top covered by nearly a dozen framed photos. A few were in color, most were black and white, and some seemed quite old. He sniffed. The room had a clean, scrubbed smell.
He tried to sit up and wished he hadn’t. Pain stabbed through his head and his left leg, and he fell back, cursing. His envenomed foot was propped up on a stack of pillows, looking evil and misshapen. It was sticking out of the leg of a pair of faded pajamas, something he’d never worn in his life. Whose? he wondered.
Lifting his hands to rub his eyes, Ned realized with a shock that something else was not right—the tiny scars dotting both forearms were gone, replaced by a pattern of faint overlapping crescents. Ned stared in disbelief. What the fuck? He ran his hands over the skin and its surface was smooth, with no ridges at all. He wet his finger and vigorously massaged a patch of the design, but it wouldn’t rub off. On top of that, the skin of his hands and arms, and probably the rest of him if he could have looked, had turned olive complexioned instead of pasty white and freckled like his mother. Ned was stunned. What had happened to him?
“You’ve been through one nasty ordeal, young fella.” A small black man stood in the doorway, dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark trousers. “But Doc Avery says you’ll survive. The worst is over. We put you in my father’s pajamas, hope you don’t mind. They seemed a pretty good fit.”
Ned didn’t remember any doctor, and he had for sure never seen this person before. He stared at the man, who could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty years old for all Ned could tell.
“Where...?” he croaked. His vocal cords felt like they hadn’t been used in years.
“I’m sorry,” the man said, coming into the bedroom. “I shouldn’t have surprised you like that. My name is Cecil Rider, pastor of Saint Christopher’s African Methodist Episcopal Church. It was two of our church members who found you and brought you here. If the Lord hadn’t brought you to us, you likely would have died out there in the woods.”
Woods! Ned saw in a flash the burning house, his crashing escape through the underbrush, the snakebite ... He shut his eyes and convulsed.
“Easy, now, have a drink of water.” The Reverend Cecil Rider picked up a glass from a nightstand near the bed and held it to Ned’s mouth as he helped the boy sit up.
“Thanks, mister,” Ned said, swallowing the water in a single long gulp.
“More?”
“Naw, it’s just ... my mouth is so dry.” He ran his tongue over cracked lips. “How long I been layin’ here?”
Cecil settled himself onto the faded gunnysack cushion of a cane rocker, crossing one leg over the other and folding his small brown hands over his knee. “Three days. It was day before yesterday when Thaddeus and his son pulled up in the yard with you in the back of their truck. Said they found you on a dirt road inside the National Forest, soaked to the skin from that big rainstorm that passed over. You were out of your head, but alive, so I sent them to fetch the Doc, and he came yesterday. Dressed your foot up and said he didn’t think he’d need to amputate—”
“What?” Ned sat up straighter. “Nobody’s cutting my foot off!”
“Easy, that’s what I’m telling you. The swelling’s gone down a lot, so looks like you’ll survive. The Lord’s doing, like I said.”
“I don’t know about that, but yeah, I’m still here.”
The man nodded and smiled. “You want to tell me your name and how can we contact your ma and pa? They must be worried sick, wondering what’s gone with you.”
“I’m just Ned. No parents. My dad died when I was five … hunting accident.” He sat still for a moment, wondering how to explain what had happened to his mother. It occurred to him that he shouldn’t give his full name, in case the police might accuse him of murdering his mother by burning her up, which was exactly what he had done.
“I ... lightning hit the house. It burned up in a flash. I tried to get my mother out, but couldn’t do it. So, I’m an orphan.” He closed his eyes and chewed on that notion for a moment. An orphan. That meant he was now free and had no family at all and could do whatever he wanted, for the first time in his life.
Cecil rose from the rocker, a look of anguish on his smooth features. “You lost your mamma in a house fire?”
Ned looked up at him. “Yeah, I did.”
He touched the boy gently on the shoulder. “That’s a terrible thing, but I’m sure the Lord spared you for a reason. You should be grateful to be alive and ask Him to help you through this terrible time. Maybe there was some reason He brought you to me.” He folded his hands in a prayerful gesture. “You’re sure there’s nobody we can contact? No aunts, no uncles?”
Ned shook his head. “There was just my mother and me. No relatives.”
Cecil sat down on the edge of the bed. “Do you still go to school?”
Ned’s defenses went up. “Naw, I quit goin’ to school when I turned thirteen,” he lied. “Mamma needed me at home. It was hard, but we had some charity help.” He shut up. The fact that he’d never been to school wasn’t anything this old colored guy needed to know.
Cecil sat there and just looked at him. Ned fidgeted under the gaze of those soft brown eyes that were kind enough, but a little cagy, like the eyes of a vole he’d once kept in a homemade cage. Ned didn’t think this was some dumb old darkie you could fool in a heartbeat. He’d better be more careful.
The Reverend Rider got up. “Well, don’t you worry yourself, son. You can stay here a bit. This was my grandmother’s room. She’s been dead quite a few years, but I don’t s’pose she’d mind you using it,” he said softly. “You lie back. I’ll check on you when it’s suppertime.”
Ned slumped back on the pillows, sweating, his mind churning. He’d expected to die, but now he’d been rescued. He’d never interacted much with black people, and the few who’d come to his mother for her services had been either shaking in their worn-out boots while the witch mixed her potions or dangerous as the snakes that fueled the brew. In any case, he knew he couldn’t stay.
* * *
“So, what’re we gonna do with that white boy? He can’t stay here without it causing trouble.” Estell looked at her husband in the fading light. They were sitting on the front steps of the small frame house the congregation of St. Christopher’s had built for Cecil’s father and his extended family back in 1925 when Cecil was in middle school. Now, half-a-dozen years after the second world war, Cecil’s father had passed on, leaving the church and the house to his son, who lived in it with just his wife. They were hoping for children, had been hoping for nearly a decade, but so far the field had proved infertile.
Cecil took her hand. “Why? He’s homeless and from what he says, motherless and fatherless. You want to just turn him out?”
“Find some whites who’ll take him in. Ask up at the Methodist Church, they’ll find somebody. Or maybe a schoolteacher knows him. I just don’t want any trouble.”
Cecil sat with bowed head. “It doesn’t feel right, after he was sent to us half-dead.”
“Brought to us, if I remember rightly. Don’t act like a darn fool. We can’t adopt him, and how do you know he’s really an orphan? He could be a runaway, just as easy. It’ll be Hell to pay, us keepin’ him.” She was frowning, keeping her voice down. “You know I’m right.”
Cecil continued to stare at the tops of his shoes. He sighed deeply. “I’ll ask around. At least let’s feed him a good supper. He seems like a nice boy.”
Estell looked her husband in the eyes. “Don’t you go getting attached to him, you hear me? I know you—take in every stray dog that wanders into the yard. This ain’t your stray dog. He belongs to somebody else, and we can’t keep him.”
“All right, I agree. Satisfied?”
“Yes.” She pecked him on the cheek and stood up, fanning herself with a magazine. “Now I’ll go start dinner. This summer sure is a scorcher.”
Cecil sat, chin in hand, wondering why he felt so unsettled. She was right, of course. Although some brave souls had recently tried protesting the segregation of the races in schools and public places, it wasn’t a crusade he wanted to jump into. Last year he’d read in the paper about that little girl Linda Brown in Topeka, Kansas, whose case had been taken to court by the NAACP. But Kansas was a long way from Magnolia, Florida. A childless black couple taking in a homeless white teenager ... it wouldn’t be tolerated. The Klan didn’t seem all that visible in this quiet rural community, but he didn’t want to test that assumption.